Louise Perry examines global birth rate declines, with South Korea at 0.7 and most nations below replacement—except sub-Saharan Africa—linking drops to affluence even at modest GDP levels like Indonesia’s. She contrasts pre-modern kinship networks (Dunbar’s 150) with modern urban alienation, critiquing the "two-income trap" and corporate materialism over homemaking. High-fertility groups (Amish, ultra-Orthodox Jews) thrive despite secularism, while hyper-progressive ideologies may falter due to reproductive incompatibility. Perry’s Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast reframes sex differences as natural, opposing leftist feminism’s rejection of traditional roles, signaling a shift toward addressing societal dysfunctions through biological realism. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Louise Perry.
You know, I always tell you that I give you tomorrow's news today.
And a long time ago, I told you that there was an uprising of tremendously intelligent and insightful women that nobody had noticed at that moment.
Women like Mary Harrington, Erica Bakioki, Angela Franks is one of the lesser known, but one of my favorites.
And Louise Perry is one of them, women who are, I won't say rebelling against feminism necessarily because that word has become kind of so amorphous, it's hard to even know what it means, but rebelling against the current state of gender relations and sexual relations.
Louise wrote a really fascinating book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
She now has a podcast with the great title that I want to ask her about, Maiden Mother Matriarch Louise.
It's good to see you again.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me.
So the first thing I want to talk to you about is an article that I read a while back.
And for some reason, we just didn't have, couldn't fit you in when the article came out.
It was in First Things.
And it was called Modernity's Self-Destruct Button, which I thought was a great title.
And you're talking about something that I've been talking about a lot because I feel is probably the biggest story happening outside of the news that nobody seems to be paying attention to.
It's that people stopped having babies.
And if you do the math, when people stop having babies, it's not that good for the future of humanity.
And there's just an amazing drop in the replacement rate of people not having enough babies to replace the human race.
So could you describe, first of all, what you're seeing in terms of the numbers, the fertility drop off?
What exactly is the state of play that we're dealing with?
So yeah, as you say, we're seeing massive drops in fertility really everywhere, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa.
Obviously, some places are further ahead in this process than others.
The lowest total fertility rate in the world is in South Korea.
Northeast Asian countries are particularly low fertility.
Western Europe, America for a period was higher than Europe, now dropping too.
It's actually very rare now to have a society that is not below the replacement level.
And this is one of those sociological puzzles that attracts a lot of different theories.
And you'll hear with great confidence people telling you it's because of property prices, it's because of loss of religion, it's, you know, a whole heap of causes are attributed to this.
I had a really good look at the data and I concluded, and it's not a very happy conclusion, that actually the thing that makes people stop wanting to have children, apparently, is affluence.
It's actually a point that you reach in terms of GDP per capita, and it's not that high, right?
It's about the level of, say, a country like Indonesia, where suddenly people are less interested in having children, right?
And there are, there are, you know, I mean, the thing that I think is very important for us to hone in on in terms of working out where we go next is looking at the groups for whom that isn't happening.
So it is the case that even within affluent countries, the people who are still having relatively large families tend to be more religious.
They tend to be more rural.
They tend to be more politically conservative.
They tend to be more clannish.
I mean, there are all sorts of factors that are going on.
Basically, people who can, my thesis is, in this sense, the modernity self-destruct button, is that actually there are a problem within modernity itself in the sense that when you hit that point where people are so affluent that they lose the desire to reproduce themselves, modernity can't go on, essentially.
So one way or another, my expectation is that one way or another, more traditional cultures, more traditional kinds of societies are going to be the ones that flourish in the coming centuries.
So one of the things that I was thinking as I was reading this article, I've read it actually a couple of times because I thought it was a great article.
It was really interesting, well written and well reasoned and cautiously reasoned, which I always appreciate, that modernity and affluence get a little bit conflated.
So affluence is really a relative term.
I mean, if you lived in Victorian England, you were affluent compared to anybody who had ever lived before.
Is it the modernity or is it the affluence that modernity brings that you think is at the heart of the cause?
Good question.
I think that to some extent these are a kind of constellation of social phenomena that come together with affluence.
So urbanization, we've known for a long time that urbanization tends to shred fertility.
I mean, that was even true in ancient Rome, that Rome always had really actually very low fertility, below replacement, and that it's people, that the city survived because it was constantly drawing people in from rural areas.
I think that's always been true.
Secularism similarly seems to be associated with affluence.
We don't exactly know why.
You know, there are a lot of puzzles within this phenomenon, which are quite hard to tease apart because they sort of come together.
I mean, my suspicion, honestly, is that it is actually the affluence itself, in the sense that the way that society needs to be structured in order to become affluent also lends itself towards having low fertility.
And the argument that I make in that first things piece is that we really need to understand the Industrial Revolution as the key point historically where we start to see this trend developing.
And obviously post-industrial revolution, you did still see very high birth rates.
There's this, what sociologists talk about is the various demographic transitions.
So you go from the standard in pre-modern societies where you have high birth rates and high death rates.
And then you have, so the population doesn't grow very much.
And then you have post-industrialization, which happened first in Britain.
You have continued high birth rates, but you have low death rates.
And so you see a population explosion.
And then you reach the point later on where the birth rates also settle.
And for a period in the 20th century in the West, they settled at sort of like high enough to still cause societies to be above replacement.
But then it's since really the 1970s that we've seen them plummet still further, right?
And I think that industrialization kind of inevitably sets off that chain of demographic events because it causes people to urbanize, it causes migration across the world, it causes it causes the dissolution of the extended family and of the kind of village kinship structures, which have always really dominated in human history up until kind of five minutes ago, right?
Which actually are, there are downsides to living in the you ever heard of Dunbar's number?
No.
This is Robin Dunbar is a sociologist.
He theorized that the number, the size of human group that people are always kind of pulled towards.
So this is often the size of a village, the size of an army battalion, the size of an academic year, things like that, is about 150.
So the sort of normal way that people have tended to live throughout the long, the long, long history of humanity is in groups of kind of 150.
Everyone is sort of related to each other a bit.
You know, there isn't a lot of, there aren't a lot of strangers in the group.
And for all of the downside of this kind of structure, it's very, very well geared towards reproduction in that you are having children in an environment where you're surrounded by people who also have a genetic investment in your children and who want you to reproduce and who will encourage you.
You know, everyone complains that their grandmother is always like nagging them to have more babies.
Like there's a reason for that.
It's in your grandmother's interest for you to do that.
Whereas you move to the city and suddenly you are surrounded by strangers who don't give a damn about your reproduction or, you know, they have no investment in your children.
And I think that there ends up being a kind of vicious spiral where people, when people don't have children, it makes it normal to not have children and it makes life more difficult for the people that do.
And I observe this a lot.
I have two young children myself.
Living in a very low fertility society, there are ways in which being the parent of young children is made more difficult by the fact that no one else is doing it or very few other people are doing it.
And I think that that's why in particular places like South Korea, you really see this downward spiral.
And look, I don't think it's going to go on indefinitely.
Some people think, oh, this will just go on forever and the human race will go extinct.
I don't think that's the case because you're already seeing some groups who are withstanding this.
Like the really extreme examples would be the Amish or ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Up until recently, Mormons had very high fertility rates.
That's dropped, but it's still quite high.
There is still variation.
And my suspicion, I don't think it's a wild speculation, is that it's those kind of groups that are going to prosper.
Why Blinds Matter00:02:23
And it's the kind of hyper-urbanized, very cosmopolitan, very sort of career-focused sort of groups that are going to just dissipate one way or another.
As a writer, you know, I spend a lot of my time alone and I value my privacy.
There is nothing worse than realizing your neighbors can see into your living room when you're acting out scenes from your new novel and they can see you because your old blinds don't do the job anymore.
It's 2025 and your blinds might still be from 2005, which is now the ancient past.
So I'm excited about 3-Day Blinds.
They are the leading manufacturer of custom window treatments in the U.S. and they make the whole process ridiculously easy.
You can do all the shopping right from the comfort of your home.
And right now, if you use my URL, 3dayblinds.com/slash Claven, they are running a buy one, get one 50% off deal.
Their design consultants have over 10 years of experience and come right to your home with thousands of samples, no more guessing what your blinds will look like.
And the best part is they handle everything, design, measuring, installation.
Plus, they can even set you up with smart blinds that connect to your home automation system.
After helping over 2 million people get their dream window treatments in the past 45 years, they know what they're doing.
Right now, you can get quality window treatments that fit your budget with three-day blinds.
Head to 3DBlinds.com/slash Claven for their buy one, get one 50% off deal on custom blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery for a free, no charge, no obligation consultation.
Head to three, that's the number three, 3dayblinds.com slash Claven.
One last time, that's buy one, get one 50% off when you head to the number three, D-A-Yblinds.com slash, how do you spell it?
K-L-A-V-A-N.
You know, you mentioned the Industrial Revolution.
I wrote about this in a book called The Truth and Beauty, and Mary Arrington wrote about it in her book, is that one of the things it did is it stripped women of their cottage industries.
took over things that were, you know, women were called the distaff because they made clothes, which is an urgent job and growing food.
And if you read the description of a good wife in Proverbs and the Bible, she's an amazing economic engine.
She's not just, as we would say now, just a homemaker.
The Decline Of Women's Cottage Industries00:10:16
But it's at that moment that sort of feminism becomes a thing.
It's at that moment that women feel that their economic usefulness has been taken away from them, that there's a reaction where the women start to become the angel of the house, you know, that kind of they get kind of divinized in this way, lifted above humanity, and which just seems really uncomfortable to me.
And I'm wondering if at that point that the relationship between the sexes changes in ways that are bad for men and women, that are bad for, I mean, obviously we're meant to be together, we're meant to come together, we're meant to reproduce together.
And somehow that becomes more difficult at that moment.
Does that play into this, do you think?
Well, certainly, yes.
Well, I say there are two ways in which that feeds into low fertility.
One is atomization, right?
That when you have the reason that the feminine mystique, as Betty Friedan called it in the 1960s, right, this phenomenon of women living in the American suburbs, middle-class women getting very unhappy with their lot as homemakers.
What was going on there was loneliness, right?
Because you had had this mass exodus to the suburbs.
And one of the features of middle-class American life or upper middle-class American life is an enormous amount of inward migration.
So people were living very far from their relatives often, and they didn't have existing communities.
They weren't kind of embedded, they didn't live in this Dunbar's number kind of village, right, far from it.
And they were enormously lonely.
And that remains a problem across the West as a consequence of all sorts of sociological phenomena of the last century or so.
And those kind of conditions absolutely discourage people from starting families because they don't feel they don't have the support networks.
They don't feel that sense of security and purpose.
They don't have grandmother around them nagging them to have children, you know.
The other way that I think this phenomenon feeds into low fertility is women's work.
So I'm afraid it is absolutely the case that women's education and women's labor market participation are correlated with low fertility.
Interestingly, women's incomes do not correlate with fertility in the sense that a woman can still, if she has an income received from, say, money she's inherited or income that she's sharing with her husband who earns it, that doesn't lower her fertility.
What lowers her fertility is at earnings?
So when women are the ones, when women are tasked with earning money, like obviously there's a really difficult tension there between, you know, mothering is very time consuming and having a career is also very time consuming.
Something's got to give.
In most cases, you know, it's a few women make it work, but in general, that's a really difficult tension.
It's what Elizabeth Warren, of all people, called the two-income trap, where when you have a family, when it becomes the norm for women to work, which wasn't the norm up until really quite recently, and when I say work, I don't mean the sort of cottage industries in the home that Mary writes about.
I mean the going out all day and doing a 40-hour kind of standard job outside the house kind of work.
Women have always worked in some, you know, one capacity or another, but that kind of specific labor market participation, I think, is new.
when it is the norm for women to do that, when it's the norm for families to depend on those two incomes from both the mother and the father, then as soon as one of those incomes is knocked out, either through some disaster like someone becoming unemployed or more pertinently, a woman dropping out of the labor market to look after her children, suddenly that's an economic catastrophe for the household.
And it means that, and the point that Elizabeth Warren also makes is that that norm of having two incomes drives up property prices because everyone is competing with other families who will want the same thing, right, which is a family home in a safe area with good schools.
And the families that have two incomes to contribute to that race are at an advantage.
And so, I mean, this is one of the things that I've complained about so many times in terms of the critique of this style of feminism.
It isn't the case really that women have more choices when that is the norm.
What often ends up happening, in fact, is that women feel obliged to have fewer children than they say that they want and also to spend more time away from their children than they say that they want.
Because that, you know, and this is often presented as being an obviously good thing for women.
And I just don't think that's true with clear exceptions.
But I think in general, that's not true.
You know, it strikes me that there's a lot of, it's like a conspiracy of interests.
You know, you have Simone de Beauvoir saying women should not be allowed to make this choice to stay home and take care of their children because they will make that choice.
That's why they should not be allowed to do it because that's the choice they'll make.
You have industries, corporations obviously benefiting from a two-family working because it means that there's double the number of workers.
And it's one of the reasons I think that wages have stagnated throughout the West.
And then you have socialists who want to destroy the family because it's a bulwark against government power.
And so you end up with a culture, it seems to me, that denigrates homemaking, which also seems to me one of the most important jobs that anybody has, to have a home, to have a place to go to.
It's incredibly civilizing.
It's incredibly joy-inducing.
I mean, ask anybody.
I always say, if you don't think mothers are important, go insult a guy who's bigger than you and go over into him and insult his mother.
And when you get out of your coma, you'll find out how important it is.
So this seems to me to be like a sort of, you know, almost an outgrowth of materialism, I guess.
This primacy of material gain, of profits, all of which has helped people become richer and leads back to your point that affluence is destroying human life.
Is there some response to that?
I mean, it seems like such a vast cultural wide, culture-wide benefit to the worst among us, or at least the most materialist and greedy among us.
Let me see if I can put this succinctly.
It seems to me that mothers and homemakers are now denigrated instead of elevated, that that is something when I talk to women, they say, well, I'm just a homemaker.
And I always think like, you know, really?
I mean, is that really just a mom, just like, you know, the most important, the center of human civilization?
Is there a cultural response that can be made to this?
My friend David Goodhart has written a really good book recently called The Care Dilemma, which is about the problems presented by women's mass influx into the labor market.
And the point that he makes is that what that influx represented was a one-time boost to GDP.
And it did, you know, like it is the case that to sort of steel man this position, it is the case that women are just as intelligent as men on average.
women have all sorts of skills that they can offer to employers.
Women often very much want to participate in the professions which they were historically excluded from.
And when it became possible for women to do that, you did see sudden gains in productivity, which were beneficial and which to some extent contributed to the growth in wealth in the 20th century.
But the downside, and this is the care dilemma that David describes, is that suddenly all of this work that women were doing, unpaid and often unrecognized within the home, who was going to do it?
So we've been talking about childcare.
That's obviously the very important one.
Who was going to do it?
I mean, you can, to some extent, there's an economy of scale with daycare centers so that you can have fewer women looking after more children and, you know, maybe kind of the children still get looked after.
But every parent knows that actually the stress of having two jobs plus daycare is much greater than just having one job, right?
And then having the person at home to look after the rest of it, because actually trying to get all the moving parts to fit together is very difficult.
And there's so much that a mother does that a daycare center does not do.
There's so much that a mother does that a nanny does not do actually.
If you actually sit down and add up all the all the professionals that you would need to employ in order to replace one stay-at-home mother, right?
So the nanny, the cleaner, the cook, you know, on a 24-7 shift pattern, right?
Like enormously expensive.
What stay-at-home mothers do is immensely valuable in the sense that it, you know, supporting supporting the person who's going out to work, looking after children, looking after elderly people, looking after the sick, doing things within the community.
There was this, there was, and to some extent still is, but it's reducing, this great well of kind of invisible, almost invisible women who do things like support local charities, arrange local community events, support their churches, you know, this, all of this labor, you know, quote unquote, I don't want to make it sound like it's necessarily onerous because often people do it because they want to.
But there were all these things that women were doing, which went unrecognized by the normal economic markers like GDP.
And it made it seem, and taking those women and putting them into the labor market made it seem as if the country was becoming more prosperous.
But it was an illusion generated by the way that we assess value.
And the fact that what those women were doing was apparently valueless, right?
The Artificial Womb Dilemma00:11:00
You couldn't put a number on it, does not mean that society hasn't suffered as a consequence of this change.
No, it was valueless because it was priceless.
But I mean, that's, yeah, well, that's a really good insight.
And added to that, of course, is that the brain science of what goes on between a mother and a baby is now kind of religiously inspiring.
I mean, the incredible connection.
I mean, it's funny.
It's in the poetry of Wordsworth.
He writes about how a mother's connection to her baby makes that person into a person.
And now the brain science has borne that out in ways that are almost unbelievable.
So now you said at one point that you felt that this decline in fertility would not continue.
What are you foreseeing there?
I think that one way or another, the people and the groups of people and the cultural elements that are lending themselves to being fertile will be selected for.
It's kind of basic Darwinian science, right?
That whatever is capable of creating children, this saying, the future belongs to those who show up, Which is one of the reasons why I am, I am not the kind of hyper-progressivism, which I'm very critical of, right?
The really extreme woke stuff, the, you know, transgenderism, like the environment, the environmentalism that lends itself towards people refusing to have children for the planet, you know, all this kind of quite extreme late modern political phenomena.
They're not going to last.
And you know why they're not going to last?
Because they don't generate, they don't encourage people to have children, you know, and so like they might last for a little bit, but basically the people who are most drawn to those things, they're not reproducing or they're not having nearly enough children to be at replacement rate.
The people that you see who are having lots of children, I mean, in a weird kind of way, it's like a good news story for conservatives.
The people who are having lots of children are the people who are, for instance, more religious, who are more inclined to get married.
I'm not saying that this phenomenon is great.
I think we're going to go through a lot of economic pain.
I think that the welfare state cannot survive this process, because it's basically a Ponzi scheme, right?
It's not like this is going to be easy, but I do think that in a sense, this problem is going to fix itself.
Just to offer a nightmare response to that, one of the things that I actually foresee happening that I think is going to be one of the truly great disasters for humankind, a genuine danger for humankind, is the invention of the artificial womb, a sort of brave new world society where you have a little drawer that you pull out and people sit around and snicker about the fact that poor women used to actually have to go through all the pain and trouble of giving birth.
And in that brave new world scenario in the novel, women become sort of sex toys of a sort and sex becomes meaningless and this empty inhuman world that your only response to it is suicide by the end of the novel.
There is this transhuman movement that does seem to have a certain grasp of the future that maybe people like me don't have.
This idea that we are played out as a force for progress, that the human beings are just these meat sacks that are way, way behind and AI can do everything we do better.
There's a lot of flaws with that reasoning, but it does have a certain power of materialist presence.
Does that idea bother you at all?
Or is that, am I writing science fiction?
I might be wrong about this, but my suspicion is that the problem presented by birth rates, the modernity self-destruct button issue, actually will arrest that because it's a very clear rule within economics, I'm told, I'm not an economist, that shrinking populations are not innovative populations.
That the periods when you see great leaps forward in technology are periods where you have an expanding number of particularly, that you have this big bold of young people, right?
Because for some reason, human psychology is such that the people who are always, always are most likely to develop these kind of technological breakthroughs are young men.
And a society that doesn't have very many young men or is putting those young men towards other tasks, you know, like, for instance, keeping keeping the welfare state on the road you know all the the challenges presented by an aging population is not a society that is likely to generate those kind of technological breakthroughs.
I mean, I might be wrong about that, but I think it is highly likely that actually and Robin Hansen, he's an economist and futurist who's written a lot on this, he thinks this as well that we are actually going to see uh, stalling and declining of technological sophistication in the coming years, and to some extent we've already seen that.
I mean, we haven't been back to the moon for 50 years.
Concord Is has been discontinued.
I mean, there are.
There are so many examples of ways in which basically the only technological breakthroughs that we're currently making are to do with communication technologies and social media.
Apart from that, actually this is the last half century has been a bit of a damp squib.
I think the idea that we're going to see artificial I know that this is very exciting for a lot of kind of techno optimists, that artificial wombs are just on the horizon, but you know, people have been saying that for a long time, artificial wombs have always been a source of interest for science fiction writers and for, and for some um, futurists.
But actually it's very very, very difficult to create an artificial womb.
I mean, all that we can do at the moment is basically keep an embryo alive in vitro for, you know, a week at one end, and then keep a baby alive in a uh, an incubator for from about 24 weeks.
There's still that big, big chunk in the middle that actually we don't really have any idea.
I mean, we don't really know how pregnancy works.
It's actually a very mysterious, very subtle process.
I think the chances that we're going to be able to create a machine that can replicate that, given the stakes as well right, like we really don't want to be creating babies who are terribly malformed by this process going wrong um, I don't think that's very likely.
And I also think I mean, I reached this conclusion.
I've thought that for a long time right, that the tech is probably not there but um I, I I reached another conclusion recently because my son, my second son was born early.
He had to be born early and he spent his first week in the neonatal intensive care unit on a breathing machine and it occurred to me while I was sitting there you know, basically 24, seven for a week that this is what an artificial womb would be like.
It would be like a niku right, you'd have like rows of.
I mean, he was, he was, he was an almost turned baby, so he wasn't especially small.
But most babies on the nick you are very premature and kind of these tiny, uncanny little creatures completely dependent on machines, completely dependent on the nursing staff around them.
And every parent who's had a baby on the Niki will tell you that it is the one of the worst experiences that you can go through.
Yeah, and it made me realize that actually no one is going to want to do this.
No psychologically normal mother is going to say, you know what pregnancy sucks?
And I tell you I had a terrible second pregnancy right, terrible.
But even I think I would so much rather go through that than hand my baby over to the machines.
And I think that I think that I think almost everyone will feel exactly that way and that's a big part of the reason why it will never get off the ground, so that dystopian future, I think, isn't coming.
No, that's really interesting.
I mean, when you think about it, there's got to be all kinds of spiritual, psychological, personality ramifications to not being inside your mother while you're developing.
I'm out of time, but I have to ask you one question.
The name of your podcast is Maiden Mother Matriarch, which I just love.
I think it's a great, but it is an interesting reference to the roles that women play.
And one of the things that leftist feminism has been very opposed to is roles.
I'm very in favor of roles.
I think they're actually prescribed by nature and nature is God, as we say here in America.
Why did you call it that?
Yeah, it's an old term from English folklore.
So the idea that I was running with is that women's lives are more segmented than men's are by virtue of our reproductive lives.
So it is, for instance, not uncommon for women to have completely different professional lives depending on where they're at in their childbearing life.
You know, the idea that you just, you start a job age 20 and you stay in it until you're 65 and that's it.
That's very, very rare for women, actually, because it's not suited to this, the nature of our nature of our reproductive role.
And the theme that I'm constantly revisiting in the podcast, alongside other themes like religion and demographics and all of this, but is this idea of sex differences and that actually sex differences are not something to be denied or something to be feared, that actually it is just the nature of men and women that we are different in important and often in complementary ways.
Sometimes those differences bring us into tension, but just as often they are just interesting or funny or useful or whatever.
And so yes, I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about sex differences, not least when it comes to motherhood and fatherhood.
Yeah.
Excellent.
Louise Perry, one of this group of women, of highly intellectual thinking women who are attacking the problems that we're having with gender, which I think are at the center of many of our problems.
Louise, it's always good to see you.
It's nice to talk to you.
I appreciate your coming on.
And you, thank you so much.
Always really interesting talking to Louise Perry and this other, this really is a movement that I noticed almost instantaneously and only now is actually becoming more noticeable.
You know, Mary Harrington, Eric Bakioking, this Angela Franks, who I like because she writes about literature so brilliantly.
But it's a good thing.
It is a good thing to have women thinking about a gender in a serious, non-leftist feminist way, because this is at the heart of our dysfunction in every possible way.
Good to see you.
I hope you will come on Friday to the Andrew Clavin Show.